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Tuesday, October 3, 2017

Zero Avenue - Spotlight and Q & A

Set in 1979, Kalteis’s grisly, violent fifth crime novel (after 2016’s House of Blazes)
celebrates the seedy side of Vancouver and the punk scene there. Singer
Frankie Del Rey’s got musical talent and drive, but to make a buck
she’s running dope for Marty Sayles, the powerful drug dealer who has
the whole Eastside in a fearsome grip. Johnny Falco’s pretty sweet on
Frankie—and his Falco’s Nest is one of the few clubs willing to give her
band, Waves of Nausea, and other punk players a chance. But Johnny’s in
debt up to his neck and takes a huge risk to get back in the black. The
stakes rise when enforcer Zeke Chamas and henchmen Sticky and Tucker,
who tend Marty’s pot farm off Zero Avenue, go after Frankie’s bass
player, Arnie Binz, when he steals some of Marty’s illegal harvest.
References to actual singers and bands, such as Joey “Shithead” Keithley
of D.O.A., will resonate with those who came of age in the late ’70s,
and if a literary prize existed for depicting the most offensive club
lavatories, this novel would win it hands down. (Oct.)

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Bio: Dietrich
Kalteis’s fourth novel House of
Blazes won this year’s silver medal for historical fiction in the
Independent Publishers Awards. Kirkus Reviews hailed it a cinematic adventure.
Publishers Weekly called his third novel Triggerfish high-octane
action that keeps readers on the edge of their seats. Crimespree Magazine said
it satisfies the need for all things dark and leaves the reader breathless. The
National Post called The Deadbeat Club a breakout for Kalteis,
and his debut novel Ride the Lightning won a bronze medal for
best regional fiction in the Independent Publishers Awards, and was hailed as
one of Vancouver’s best crime novels. His upcoming novel Zero Avenue will
be released in October of this year through his publisher ECW Press. Nearly
fifty of his short stories have been published internationally, and his
screenplay Between Jobs is a past-finalist in the Los Angeles
Screenplay Festival. He lives with his family in West Vancouver, British
Columbia and is currently working on his next novel.

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Since the three short stories
published here on Dew on the Kudzu in 2009 and 2012, you’ve had four novels
published to date, with a fifth being released this October. Tell us about the
latest one.

It’s called Zero
Avenue,and it’s crime fiction
set to the cranking beat and amphetamine buzz of Vancouver’s early punk scene. It follows Frankie Del Rey, a
rising punk star who runs just enough dope on the side to pay the bills and
keep her band, Waves of Nausea, together. The trouble is she’s running it for Marty Sayles, a powerful drug dealer
who controls the Eastside with a fist.

When
Frankie strikes up a relationship with Johnny Falco, the owner of one of the
only Vancouver clubs willing to give punk a chance, she finds out he’s
having his own money problems keeping Falco’s Nest open.
Desperate to keep his club, Johnny raids one of the pot fields Marty Sayles has
growing out past Surrey, along Zero Avenue on the U.S. border. He gets away
with a pickup load and pays back everybody he owes. Arnie Binz, bass player for
Waves of Nausea, finds out about it and decides that was easy enough. And when
he tries it, he gets caught by Marty’s crew.

While
Johnny and Frankie set out to find the missing Arnie, Marty Sayles is looking
for who ripped him off the first time — a trail that leads to Johnny and
Frankie.

You started out writing short stories, then wrote crime fiction and
historical novels. Was this part of the plan?

There was no
plan, but it ended up being a good way for me to do it. Writing short stories allowed
me to play around with different genres and to submit my work. Getting a story
accepted sure goes a long way to encouraging a budding writer to keep going.
And writing every day led me to finding my voice, and that was the most
important thing of all.

Do
you still write short stories?

I love writing
short stories, and I recently finished one called Bottom Dollar which
will appear in the upcoming collection Vancouver Noir, part of Akashic
Books’ Noir Series, edited by Sam Wiebe.

You’ve woven together fiction with fact to pull off Zero Avenue. How
much of it is real, and what kind of research went into making it all come
together?

Listening to
the music and talking to people who remembered those times helped inspire and
to get the vibe right. And there are some interesting books on the subject
whichhelped fill in
a lot of the details: Guilty of Everything by John Armstrong, Perfect
Youth by Sam Sutherland, I, Shithead and Talk-Action=Zero, both by Joe
Keithley helped relive those times. And there was Bloodied but Unbowed,
an awesome documentary by Susanne Tabata.

Why did you choose Vancouver’s punk rock scene as the setting?

What I liked
about the scene was its edge and the ‘us against them’ outlook, how that indie ‘shake it up’ attitude threw a middle finger to the status quo. It
made a sharp contrast to what some considered a sleepy backwater town at the
time. And itjust seemed
the perfect setting for a crime novel. Oh, and they didn’t have Google Earth
and satellite imagery back then, so it was a lot easier to hide something the
size of a pot field.

Are you characters based on people you know, now or in the past, and
what goes into developing them?

I never base
characters on anyone I know, although maybe I’ve borrowed a tick or quality
from people I know or met and passed that onto my fictitious friends. Mostly
these characters take shape and get fleshed out as I work my way through the
first draft. As they develop, I like to let them dictate their own course, and
I try not influence their decisions based on my own ways or beliefs.

And it’s
important that their dialog sounds unique and authentic to each of them. A lot
of who they are comes through in the way they speak. Their words inform, show
relationships between characters, hint at motivation and give a glimpse at
their backstory. A lot of times what lies under their words, what they’re not
saying, tells us more than their actual words.

What would you like the reader to take away from this story?

Simply, I’d
like them to be entertained and to keep turning the pages, and when they get to
the end, I’d like them to ask what else has this guy written.

Do you have any advise for novice
writers wanting to get started?

Write as often as you can, and read what inspires you
to write. Adapt what works and make it your own. Learn the rules and then don’t
be afraid to break them.

There are a couple of good book on the subject I would
recommend to anybody starting out. On Writing: A Memoir of
the Craft by Stephen King. And 10
Rules of Writing by Elmore Leonard.

What’s coming next?

My next novel
is Poughkeepsie Shuffle,and it’s due out next year. It takes place in the
mid-eighties and centers on a guy named Jeff Nichols. Fresh out of the Don Jail
in Toronto, he gets mixed up in a smuggling ring operating from a used car lot
in an area called the Junction. The outfit brings guns in from upstate New
York, and Jeff’s a guy who’s willing to bend the rules to get
on the fast track to riches, a guy who doesn’t let the lessons from past mistakes get in the way of
a good score in the future.

The day "Claire" from Lost mentioned me!

Pat Says:

Pat Conroy just told me that I take a foul art and give it a queenly air, then he kissed my hand.

Decatur Book Festival, 2014

Books that "Stuck"

In no particular order: Bill Bryson and James Herriot....I have re-read anything they write multiple times.We're All DamagedThe End of the World Running ClubHandmaid's Tale Watership DownRiversDesperation RoadBull Mountain The Stand The Poisonwood Bible Black Beauty The Road... read once, will never read again, but it stuck. Lonesome Dove Gone With The Wind....of course Earth Abides A Brave New World

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Idgie

“She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain.” —Louisa May Alcott